Death toll in Mexico City earthquake reaches 286
By
Don Knowland
23 September 2017
By Friday afternoon, the official death toll from Tuesday’s earthquake in Mexico had reached 286. Mexico City, the nation’s capital, accounted for 148 of those deaths. Over 3,800 buildings were damaged in Mexico City alone, of which over 40 had entirely collapsed.
The building collapses led to intensive efforts to search through rubble to locate survivors. Nineteen students and six adults died when a school in Mexico City collapsed. Dozens are still missing or unaccounted for.
The epicenter of the quake was approximately 75 miles southeast of Mexico City, in Puebla state. Some small cities and towns in that and nearby states, such as Morelos and Mexico, also suffered a significant number of deaths and major damage, including the destruction of many adobe brick structures.
Seismologists are suggesting that the quake was not of a “subduction” nature, where one of the earth’s plates sinks below another. Such earthquakes generate the largest magnitudes and destructive power, including the 8.2 temblor that occurred on September 7 off the coast of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, and the massive 8.1 quake in 1985 centered on the Michoacán coast, 200 miles west-southwest of Mexico City, which led to the deaths of at least 10,000 people.
Mexico City, with a population of nearly nine million, and other portions of the neighboring metropolitan zone, encompassing 25 million people, are particularly vulnerable to the effects of earthquakes because much of the area once consisted of a series of interlocking lakes, which were later dried up and filled in. This includes Lake Texcoco, on whose lakebed the city now rests.
Given the thick deposits of sand and clay and the often muddy…